Entries in Dany Bahar
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Aston Martin chief Andy Palmer has wasted no time shaking things up since leaving Nissan’s U.K. branch for Aston’s HQ in Gaydon. His latest move has been to hire Matthew Becker from Lotus, naming him Chief Engineer, Vehicle Attribute Engineering. Becker moves into his new role just after the start of the New Year after 26 years with Lotus. In this position, Becker will do many of the same things he did at Lotus as Chief Engineer, Vehicle Test and Development. This includes vehicle dynamics, aerodynamics, vehicle durability, NVH testing, and more.

Ansar Ali. Ex-Ford, ex-Lotus, ex-Caterham and reluctant cheese magnate turned CEO of Zenos Cars.“I’m a mechanical engineer by first degree,” says, Zenos Cars CEO Ansar Ali “and a pretty bad one at that. So, like any engineer who realizes he’s not going to be a good one, I went and got an MBA. While I was in business school, I was recruited by Ford, and I joined the company in 1991, and had seven great years.” That’s when Ali became involved in the family business, something he calls a “cardinal mistake”. According to Ali, “My uncle had a very large cheese making business, and he asked me to join with a view of taking over. We made 10 tons of cheese per day, and this caused me to lose any desire I ever had to eat the stuff. After a couple of years, I decided this wasn’t for me.”

Recruited by Lotus in early 2000, Ali was general manager of the U.K. and Europe, and thought he was joining the company at one of its high points when Managing Director Chris Knight suddenly put him charge of cleaning up after the M250 sports car program was canceled. “There was quite a lot of fallout with the dealers, customers and PR, and from 2000-2005 I went through three MDs, Chris Knight, Victor Kiam and Kim Olgaard-Nielsen. (Olgaard-Nielsen’s reign often was referred to by Lotus insiders with a Star Trek mindset as the “Wrath of KO-N.” He was not well liked.)

It was at this point that Ali crossed paths with Mark Edwards, who would later help run the show at both Caterham and Zenos Cars. “He was sort of Chris Knight’s righthand man, and we got to know each other when Chris was putting together various cost-down, cash flow and other firefighting teams to stem the bleeding. Mark, a production engineer by degree, was pulled out of one of these task forces, and became Knight’s go-to troubleshooter. If there was a problem, he would parachute in.” Like Apple’s legendary CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, Edwards is a binary, all black or white, manager who shakes things up by drilling down to the essentials. “We complement each other very well,” says the loquacious, always smiling Ali.

When will he go away?Recently, I had the pleasure of regaling colleagues with stories about Lotus, Proton and DRB-Hicom during a dinner in Monterey, California. As an off-the-record chat, I was free to mention many of the things I have learned over the years, as well as my theories, suspicions, etc. Things I could never do in print without copious documentation… and a really, really good legal team.

One of the listeners at that dinner contacted me about Dany Bahar’s lawsuit against Lotus, wondering if there was anyone who would go on the record about the lawsuit. Here’s what I had to say:

Lotus Evora: The last car done under the old regime, it came iin on time and budget, and was to be the centerpiece of cooperative ties with ToyotaDRB-HICOM Berhad’s (DRB-Hicom) recent acquisition of PROTON Holdings Berhad (Proton) also gave the company control of Lotus Group International Limited, the owner of struggling British engineering consultancy and sports car maker, Group Lotus PLC (Lotus) - or, if you wish to read that another way, the scapegoat for Proton’s losses for the past 15 years. I will admit Lotus has not been consistently profitable even when the company’s accounts have been in the black, but claiming that the low-volume car manufacturer from Hethel is the cause of the turmoil in Kuala Lumpur is like saying the tail can wag the dog.

Honest. I wanted to be done with this Lotus nonsense for a while. Chapter 7 of the Group Lotus vs. Team Lotys saga was supposed to be it. Then Dany Bahar went and did this:

Just when you think things can’t get any more ridiculous, they do. Take the latest out of Lotus. The U.K.-based sports car maker has named Kasseem Daoud Dean as its new Vice President of Creative Design and Global Marketing. He is more consultant than employee, and another sign that Dany Bahar and company are floundering.